British Gas owner Centrica (LON:CNA) said it has performed well in the year to date, with the UK residential business benefiting from its strong competitive position but upstream, the business continues to face low gas prices.
The Downstream UK business, British Gas, has had a very strong start to the year, and the number of joint energy and services households we serve grew by 50,000 in the first quarter.

Energy efficiency measures have continued to reduce underlying average energy consumption, however the colder than normal weather in each of the first three months of the year resulted in average residential gas consumption being 7% higher and average residential electricity consumption being 2% higher than the same period in 2009. Despite this higher consumption, the total energy bill for a British Gas residential customer was, on average, lower in the first quarter of 2010 than over the same period in 2009, as a result of our market leading reduction of 7% in the standard gas tariff at the start of February. This made British Gas the cheapest supplier for both gas and electricity, at average consumption, across Britain and helped to drive customer growth in both fuels.

At the end of April, British Gas had over 15.9 million residential energy accounts on supply, an increase of more than 200,000 since the start of the year. Given current trading conditions, residential energy supply is expected to perform strongly in 2010 with profit heavily weighted towards the first half.

The business energy supply and services segment is performing well. Improvements in operational performance, strong renewals and higher than expected demand for energy as a result of the cold weather, have enabled further improvements in margin. Centrica said it again expect to be able to deliver strong year on year profit growth in this business.

The residential services business has continued to increase customer numbers, with over 100,000 contracts added in the first three months of the year, and we have now converted over one million contracts onto the new insurance based offering. In addition, the number of central heating systems installed was up around 20% on the same period last year, reflecting a more competitively priced product range and benefits from the Government's boiler scrappage scheme. However, the business experienced additional costs as a result of the higher incidence of boiler…

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